our bruce johnson sought answers from the director of the d.c. water department. they went for a walk through that neighborhood this afternoon. >> last night we had a storm of very significant proportions, reports of over 2 inches to over 3 1/2 inches of rain in just over an hour. when there's that much rain and the pipes themselves aren't big enough to handle that much rainwater in, the short term we don't have an immediate solution. >> reporter: you give us an answer for what happened last night, but what about the other four flooding situations we had? >> they closed down part of -- >> the weather report data shows the storms that are hitting are unusual in intensity. three of the four last intensity rain events have been in july. this is where tiger creek used to flow through, so a lot of stormwater will flow through this neighborhood and third, the system put in place was very big and that's not big enough to handle all the flow now from what's been channeled to it. there's a lot of steps that any individual homeowner or dweller can do. first we want to make